


if I die before I wake

by dancingloki



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Catholic Steve Rogers, M/M, Other, Religion, Suicide mention, could be shippy or could be friendship it's up to the reader I think, this takes place immediately post-WS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-05
Updated: 2016-02-05
Packaged: 2018-05-18 10:26:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5925015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancingloki/pseuds/dancingloki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a little bit of philosophical musing on the nature of good and evil. I've seen Steve referred to as Irish Catholic many times in fic and meta analyses, but I've come across relatively few works which discuss how his recent experiences would have affected his faith...here's my thoughts on the subject, for what it's worth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if I die before I wake

The air in the confessional booth was stale and close. Steve waited patiently for the rustle of cloth that told him the priest had entered, the breath from his lips the only current of moving air.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he began, crossing himself. “It’s been…” he paused for a moment, wondering how technical he should be, then huffed a silent laugh at his own hesitation, “about seventy years since my last confession.”

The priest was silent, neither expressing confusion and disbelief, nor chiding Steve for disturbing the sacrament of confession with jokes. He hurried to fill the silence. “I think…I think I’ve lost my faith, Father.”

“Your faith in God, my son?” the priest asked, calm and measured.

“My faith in everything,” Steve said quietly. “I don’t know what to believe in anymore.”

“A crisis of faith is common among believers, especially in the corruption of the modern world. You must—”

“This is different,” Steve cut him off. The priest gave no audible sign of annoyance at being interrupted, patiently waiting for Steve to go on.

“I’ve killed people,” he said, abruptly.

“Murder is a terrible act,” the priest responded in the same even voice. Steve shook his head.

“It wasn’t murder. At least, I don’t think so. Maybe it was. I’m—I _was_ a soldier. I was at war.” He smiled sadly to himself in the darkness of the confessional. “I guess I still am.”

“Even when permitted by the laws of man, taking another human life leaves a stain on the soul that can only be cleansed by God’s grace.”

“I didn’t come here to talk about that,” Steve mumbled, squeezing his hands together and wishing like hell he hadn’t followed the impulse that had lead him into the church.

“You know, my son, that you won’t find absolution or peace in your heart until you fully repent of your sins,” the priest said mildly, then sighed when Steve remained stubbornly silent. “You have other sins to confess?”

Steve nodded, then hurriedly said “Yes,” when he remembered the priest couldn’t see him. “It’s—honestly, Father, I’m not sure…” he trailed off.

“In the eyes of God, all acts of men are already known,” the priest reminded him gently. “Speaking them aloud may be frightening, but they are already as real as they can be. Revealing them to yourself and your confessor is the first step to excising them from your soul.”

“I don’t…” Steve tried again, then collapsed back onto the seat with an ominous creaking of ancient wood. “Honestly, Father, I don’t really know if it was a sin. It didn’t feel wrong. But somehow…”

“If sinning didn’t feel good, we would all of us be angels,” the priest pointed out. “You can’t always trust your feelings. And you would not have been brought here today unless something in your conscience was telling you that you had done wrong.”

Steve turned that thought over in his mind for a while before speaking.

“Is suicide still a sin if you didn’t die?”

The priest’s slow intake of breath rang over-loud in the stagnant box.

“That’s a complicated question,” he said evenly. “You know your life is not your own. You belong to God; your time on earth is a mere stewardship of this life, with the goal of one day returning it to Him. Any action you take, with full knowledge of that truth, to harm or prematurely end the life that belongs to God is a betrayal and a rejection of His dominion.”

“I didn’t try to kill myself,” Steve said. “At least, not exactly,” he added.

The priest sighed softly. “Perhaps, my son, instead of playing with semantics, you should simply tell me what happened, and we can determine what sin is weighing down your soul?”

“Yes, sir. Father,” Steve said, correcting himself automatically. “I…there’s this man. I…I’ve known him my whole life, since we were children. We grew up together. And he—he got taken, by some bad people, and they—changed him. They made him into someone he’s not and they made him do…terrible things. But it wasn’t him, it wasn’t his fault. And I had to stop him, because nobody else could.”

The priest stayed quiet, waiting, as Steve took a shaky breath, composing himself. “And I did. It was close. It was really, really close. There was a moment where I wasn’t sure that I could do what I would need to do to stop him. I had to _hurt_ him, Father, and I didn’t…but _millions_ of people, maybe more, would have died if I hadn’t, so I did it. But…”

He stopped again, gritting his teeth and rubbing his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I just couldn’t,” he blurted out. “He was— _is_ —everything to me, Father. Even when I had nothing, _nothing_ , I had him.”

“You’ve always had God, who stands above all men,” the priest rebuked him gently, but Steve shook his head.

“I gave up,” he went on, feeling as hollow as he was sure he sounded. “I thought he would kill me. I thought—I thought that if he could, if they’d took enough out of him that he could actually kill me, then he really was gone. Then my—my friend, my best friend, really wasn’t in there anymore. And I thought, I can’t live in that world. I’d rather be dead. So I gave up. I stopped fighting back. First time in my life.”

“But clearly, this man—your friend—here you are alive, aren’t you? If your friend retains enough of himself to spare your life, is that not cause for hope, rather than despair?”

“Yes,” Steve said hoarsely.

“Then what weighs on your mind, my son?”

“I don’t know,” Steve said miserably, voice strangled. “I just—everything’s wrong, it’s all gone wrong, the whole world. I thought—the people I left behind, who were supposed to keep fighting, protect the world, they let this evil grow right under their noses and nobody even noticed, because how can you tell the good guys apart from the bad when they’re the _same_ , they’re doing the same damn things? And he was—I thought he was _dead_ , I thought he died, _years_ ago, and all this time they were—”

He broke off, quivering, breathing heavily through his nose. The priest had stayed silent through his tirade, and was still silent now.

“How can God let this happen?” he asked, hating how helpless and broken his voice sounded in the stillness of the confessional. “How could God let the world turn into this?”

A long, tense silence filled the air before the priest answered.

“My son, do you know why the Devil exists?” he asked.

“Lucifer rebelled against God and was cast from Heaven,” Steve said hesitantly, puzzled by the sudden shift in topic.

“I see you paid attention in nursery school,” the priest teased gently. “That’s _how_ the Devil exists. But do you know why? If God is all-powerful, and He is, why does He let evil live in the world at all?”

Steve furrowed his brow in confusion. “Isn’t that the same thing I just asked you?”

The priest chuckled softly. “It’s one hell of a question, isn’t it? We know God is omnipotent, it’s a fundamental trait of His divinity. How do we believe He loves us if He lets things exist that hurt us, the way you’re hurting now?”

“Don’t suppose you got the answer in with all those questions?” Steve said to his hands, forcing a smile over the tears threatening to appear.

“I have _an_ answer, at least. I can’t promise it’s the right one; God’s mind is unknowable to men. But it’s been a comfort to me.”

“Okay,” Steve choked out.

There was a rustling of cloth as the priest shifted position. “The Devil exists because good has to be a choice. The Lord gave humanity something He’s never given to any other being: free will. He gave us a soul, and the choice of what to do with it. And a choice is not a choice unless you have more than one option.”

Steve sat back, wide-eyed, as he took in the priest’s words. “In that sense, the goodness of the Angelic Host and the evil of Satan’s horde are—to an extent—meaningless. They don’t _choose_ to be good or evil; it’s what they _are_. They can’t choose their natures any more than a nail chooses the metal it’s made from. But human beings, for whatever unknowable reason the Almighty has, do get to choose. We’re handed this life, this soul, and asked to make a choice about what to do with it. That choice has to be informed, meaning we know what we’re choosing and what our options are—think of it like a consent form in the doctor’s office. They have to answer all your questions, and tell you _all_ the choices for your treatment, before they’re allowed to perform any of them.”

“I think…I think that actually makes sense,” Steve said slowly. “If God forced us all to be good, to do the right thing, even if it was just by taking all the other options away…”

“Then we wouldn’t be human anymore,” the priest finished. “And for our choices to be real, the consequences of those choices have to be real too. Which, unfortunately, means that when the people who choose evil do evil things, they have the power to hurt the people who chose good. And even though God has the power to stop them, He doesn’t—which can be hard to accept, and it can feel like a betrayal, and that’s a very natural, human thing to feel.”

“But it’s in the service of a higher cause,” Steve murmured.

“Yes. To make being good meaningful for those who do choose God’s path.”

“Because even if you could end a war—or stop crime, forever—by holding a gun to the head of every person in the world, you don’t do it. The cost of freedom is too high.”

“Exactly. And remember, my child: God has a greater plan for all of us,” the priest said seriously, the conviction in his voice ringing in Steve’s ears. “It’s in the time of greatest difficulty that keeping faith in God, no matter what, is most important.”

“And when we fail?” Steve asked, trying to keep his voice clear of any edge of desperation.

“We try again,” the priest said simply. “You are still here, my son. You are still fighting. A harsh winter can freeze the branches of even the strongest tree, but if its roots are planted in the Living God, it will bud again when spring comes. The world is made evil not through God’s indifference, but through the choices of men. Make choices of your own to strike back, and while you have faith, they are _never_ futile, no matter how things may seem. Let that be your penance for your lapse.”

“Thank you, Father. I will,” Steve promised, crossing himself and preparing to leave.

The beginnings of his escape were aborted by the priest’s stern words. “You know, my son, that I cannot absolve you of your _other_ sins until you have truly repented of them,” he warned.

“I know, Father,” Steve said, smiling to himself. “Some other time.”

“Go with God, then,” the priest sighed, “and sin no more.”

The air out on the street was cooler than the confessional booth, and the wind that blew against Steve’s face somehow felt fresher or easier to breathe than it had before. Sam was leaning against the wall of the building next-door to the church. He straightened up, stretching out his back, as Steve came down the front steps.

“You find what you were looking for?” he asked, dark eyes searching Steve’s face.

Steve nodded his head slightly. “I think so, yeah.”

“That’s great, man. I gotta say, I’m a little jealous. I never really got the church thing.”

“Well, it’s not for everybody,” Steve said. “I was raised Catholic, though. Irish family.”

“Must be a comfort,” Sam suggested.

“It is, yeah. It helps me…find direction.”

Sam nodded, an understanding half-smile flitting across his face, and he squeezed Steve’s arm in unspoken comfort. “So where do we start?”


End file.
